Conversant (the new name for MOSAID Technologies) is a global
intellectual property management company known for its principled approach to
patent licensing and its consistent delivery of results to companies with
extensive intellectual property holdings. With a portfolio of more than 12,500
patents and patent applications under management, Conversant has special
expertise in semiconductors, communications, and automotive technology. The
company also develops innovative Flash memory technology for mass storage
applications. Founded in 1975, Conversant has offices in Ottawa, Ontario; Plano,
Texas; and Luxembourg.

editor's earlier comments:- April 2012MOSAID Technologies
designs
SSD SoC / IP technology
- which can be used by oems to design SSDs. Their market focus seems to be
towards the "fastest"
end of the flash SSD spectrum. For example their HyperLink technology could
enable SSD oems to design faster upgradable PCIe SSDs

In May
2007 - MOSAID announced its architecture (available for license) could
deliver 800M bytes/ second sustained throughput on
flash SSDs using
today's technology.

In July 2009 -
MOSAID published a white paper -
Implementing
Storage Class Memory with HLNAND (pdf) - which describes how their HyperLink
technology can achieve 1GB/s R and W throughput in a terabyte flash array
occupying only 60cm2 of motherboard. It also provides the flexibility for the
oem to populate the module with more memory after soldering. This tool might be
useful for designers of PCIe
or InfiniBand class
SSD accelerators.

In July 2011 -
MOSAID Technologies said
it will sample silicon based on its
HLNAND2 specification in
late 2011. Using a high-speed, point-to-point ring topology, HLNAND2
facilitates SSD development with data transfer rates into the multiple
Gigabyte-per-second range.

In comparison, NAND Flash interfaces
based on a parallel bus structure are limited to transfer rates of up to
200MB/s, with only a few devices supported on each channel. The company's
HLNAND 256Gb Flash memory device is packaged as an MCP composed of a stack of 9
dies - 8 industry-standard NAND Flash chips, and 1 MOSAID proprietary ASIC. The
design supports either monolithic 32Gb MLC Toggle Mode or 32Gb MLC legacy
asynchronous NAND Flash chips, evenly distributed over 4 banks.

In
April 2012
- MOSAID
Technologiesannounced
that it is sampling a 16 die NAND flash stack integrated with its
HLNAND bridge interface
in a single 100-ball BGA measuring 18mm x 14mm - which provides 512GB raw
capacity and 667MB/s aggregate simultaneous R/W throughput as a building block
for use by SSD oems to build multi-terabyte SSDs with GB/s throughput by
adding their own SSD
controllers.

In January
2015 - Novachips
acquired the HLNAND related technologies, assets and patents of Conversant
(formerly known as MOSAID.

...

...

Novachips
acquires HLNAND patents and assets

Editor:- January 26, 2015 -
Novachips
today announced
it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire
HyperLink NAND fllash
memory technology assets, including approximately 260 related patents, from
Conversant
(formerly known as MOSAID).

Novachips recently
unveiled an HLNAND-powered SSD controller that provides 16TB capacity, as
well as an HLSSD with 8TB capacity in a 2.5" form factor supporting PCIe
with NVMe host interface - using a single ASIC SSD controller in 28nm process
technology.

"Search (and in
particular the crowd sourced intelligence of StorageSearch readers) meant that
for 8 years we got the best results in the end - even if - from an individual
point of view - the reasons at the time - didn't seem so obvious."

Editor's comments:- MOSAID - which will legally
change
its name to Conversant in January 2014 - first started talking about its
HLNAND architecture in
May 2007. But the
company - which recently changed its name - has been licensing its patents in
fast memory systems design since
the 1990s.